anguish

Relationships hang on so many things, and so many things are undone when a relationship ends.

Kids, money, work pressure, where to live and how to live can tear a partnership down. The demands of the need to build a life together are so damned difficult for young couples. Yet in their twenties, thirties and forties this is what most husbands and wives do, what partners do, and do it all at once. Some survive, about half don’t. It’s a wonder anyone gets out alive.

It should be easier for older people trying to be partners—kids left home, financially independent, the family home paid off, all the fluffy romantic fantasies of young adulthood about relationships blown away like the seeds of a dandelion. Double the degree of difficulty if one person’s unencumberedness is nine years advanced on the other’s.

Turns out it’s not so easy to begin a long-term relationship at 56, and sustain it. Humans are humans, can complicate anything. And then there’s the silent killer. Everything else in a relationship can be hunky-dory but if the physical desire of one partner fails, even if physical attraction wasn’t the keystone of the thing to begin with, the whole edifice can be a pile of rocks in no time.

A loss of desire renders all other aspects of a relationship null and void. Why is it so? Why does everything hang on physical desire? Does friendship depend on physical desire, laughter, good conversation? Making physical, sexual love probably occupies less than zero point five per cent of our time together, but everything else is consigned to the dustbin with its lack.

I have lost my good woman and I have lost my best friend. With her I lose my contact and friendship with her children. I lose the person with whom I holiday, watch movies, take walks. I lose my contact with the Serbs. I lose all that future we talked about, but in the end seemed unable to come to grips with, the travel, a life together.

My parents and family lose a woman they liked, my friends lose someone they watched enriching my life.

Some relationships survive without physical passion and desire because all the other commitments to family prop them up, glue them together. My good woman and I have no common children, house, culture, finances, yard, pets or bed. Now we have lost each other and the anguish is beyond words.

I stare at the ground, sightless. The JRT barks, but I can’t hear him.